Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday July 27, 2014 @09:25AM
from the this-one-weird-trick dept.

tsu doh nimh (609154) writes KrebsOnSecurity looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers exhaust the Google AdWords budgets of their competitors.The service allows companies to attack competitors by raising their costs or exhausting their ad budgets early in the day. Advertised on YouTube and run by a guy boldly named "GoodGoogle," the service employs a combination of custom software and hands-on customer service, and promises clients the ability to block the appearance of competitors' ads. From the story: "The prices range from $100 to block between three to ten ad units for 24 hours to $80 for 15 to 30 ad units. For a flat fee of $1,000, small businesses can use GoodGoogle's software and service to sideline a handful of competitors' ads indefinitely."

I block all ads and have for the better part of a decade. Too many worries about malware, improper handling of info, tracking, you name it. It's a bad business model, anyway. I not met too many true geeks who feel much differently. If someone's business is built on something that can be manipulated and blocked so easily, the business model sucks to be sure.

...only if it's in Google's interest to block services like this instead of asking the victim to pay more money.

It is. If AdWords fail to provide a reasonable return people will stop using them and the price will drop significantly, cutting into Google's revenue. It's definitely in Google's best long term interest to stop this kind of thing.

Eyeballs bring awareness, and the hope that future purchases will be affected just by familiarity.

That works great for brand names available at the grocery store when you are already primed for buying. It does not seem to be effective if I go to a place like amazon with the intent to buy, and that product or service is not available.

Traditionally, eyeballs and click conversions have been measured, with a huge weight given to clicks. Again, brand awareness is hard to measure other than in general purchase trends. But it makes no sense to ignore the importance of click conversions and focus on eyeball measures only, or largely, or even a smallish percentage.

I have not read anything in the last decade that makes me think that in any way, a measure of eyeballs is significant in general. For anything other than brand awareness, people who would not click anyway have no need to see the ad, and eyeball measurements don't add anything.

Statistics are only meaningful when they are interpreted and understood, and eyeballs is effectively a number without meaning. It is a small part, and not worth niggling about. Especially when the point is that people who won't click don't give any benefit from watching something they won't click. Brand awareness on something that is not going to be on a list of shopped for products is throwing money away, and paying for people to watch ads they don't care about likewise.

That's why targeted advertising is such a big deal. People realize that pure eyeballs are nearly meaningless, your objections to the contrary.